Sensory Sea

A fun haptic-enabled adventure game for Android.

Summer 2016

Tanvas

Sensory Sea is a multi-level Android game in which you play as Hapty the jellyfish and you must maneuver through different obstacles in order to advance to the next stage. In order to move through each obstacle, you must fling Hapty through the gaps, while avoiding whales and the edges of the reef.

To make matters more interesting, Sensory Sea is haptic enabled. This means that part of the game is played through the sense of touch instead of just sight. Using Tanvas's touchscreen technology, we are able to create the feeling of different textures directly on top of the glass in which the game is played (on a Nexus 9). Therefore, to help get Hapty through the gaps in each obstacle, we have added a haptic texture (kind of like a buzzy feeling) over where the gap is on each level. This way, the player can simply feel on their screen where the "buzz" is, and fling Hapty safely through.

Sensory Sea was one of my main projects during my internship at Tanvas, where I was one of two core User Experience team members. We developed the game in Java using Android Studio, and mocked up the designs for both the artwork and the textures in Adobe Photoshop.